Nursing Home Deaths Up 32% During COVID: "Unnecessarily," Says an HHS Report

     Federal investigators are still trying to determine why larger numbers of nursing home patients in many states died during COVID than was necessary.

     “These were not individuals who were going to die anyway,” said Harvard health policy professor David Grabowski said of the nursing home death rate that soared 32% in 2020.

     While, at the beginning of the pandemic, in April 2020, 81,484 Medicare patients in nursing homes died, eight then months later, after lockdowns, masking, social distancing, and testing protocols became standard in the rest of the world, 74,299 nursing homes patients, a not-much-reduced number, passed away, said a comprehensive new report that was led by Christi Grimm, who is the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 

     Also, by the end of December 2020, more than half of the Medicare patients in nursing homes in Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana and New Jersey had or likely had COVID-19.

      The report not only documented higher death rates in nursing homes in every month of 2020, compared with 2021, but also recorded two spikes, in April and December, that revealed that the nursing homes were not taking adequate measures to protect their residents, who are more vulnerable than most populations, from an extremely contagious and deadly virus.

     Although nursing home facilities locked down in March of last year, the industry chronically complained that they lacked necessary protective gear, such as masks and gowns.

     The not much-improved death rates in nursing homes during COVID are causing the HHS to question whether government policy and nursing home protocols will be able to protect the most vulnerable population in future outbreaks of life-threatening illnesses. 

     “This is happening long after it was clear that nursing homes were particularly vulnerable,” said Nancy Harrison, a deputy regional inspector general, who worked on the HHS report. “We really have to look at that. Why did they remain so vulnerable?”